Anjanette Delgado, Yaddyra Peralta, and Mia Leonin on the Literature of Uprootedness

On today’s episode of The Literary Life, Mitchell Kaplan is joined by Anjanette Delgado, Yaddyra Peralta, and Mia Leonin to discuss their new anthology, Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, out now from University Press of Florida.

From the episode:

Anjanette Delgado: Latinx is not a category. It’s not an angle. It’s not a message. And so we thought for quite a bit and we researched, and it was a while before we could figure out to what unites us—and not only what unites us as Latinx people, but what unites us to you, what unites us to the rest of the state [of Florida]. And it was uprootedness.

One of the things that I say in my intro is that Florida is full of uprooted people, and they’re not all Latinx, and they’re not all from other countries. We come here uprooted from other areas of our life. We come here uprooted by health, by climate change, by changes in our lives, and we just sort of end up here and end up staying here. … All the people who tell me, Oh, I wasn’t supposed to stay here. I was just passing through and it’s been 30 years or however many, right? And so that was one of the things. And the other thing … is there are people who make it possible for us to stay.

There are people who say, I don’t want everything the same. I don’t want to live in the ’50s of milkshakes and everybody knows their name. I want change. I want progress. I want cultural vibrancy. Those are the people that make it home for us.

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Anjanette Delgado is a Puerto Rican writer and journalist based in Miami. She is the author of The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho. She has written for the New York Times “Modern Love” column, Vogue, NPR, HBO, the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, the Hong Kong Review, and others.